One of the most exciting features of the film that motivated me into creating it, was the nightclub scene. From planning to shooting, editing, looking for music and any extra effects, I was very passioned about making this scene because it was a challenge to make something really short and fast paced but still enjoyable and I wanted to make it as perfect as I could. In order to achieve this I started with the planning, which included the research of course. The main thing I decided to look into, was creating a fast paced video, which was going to give me at least some elements to work on and the kind of things I needed to pay attention to.
The first thing I found, which was most likely the most important one, was Changing the Pace:
If you come back from your car show shoot with nothing but three static shots of the cars, your options are going to be severely limited. Faster pacing usually requires good coverage, which means shooting a variety of shots and angles of your subject. Ultra wide and ultra close-up, high angle and low, reflections, details, shots with and without people or other objects that can show the relative size and shape of your subject; some or all of these can help you provide good coverage in addition to your basic scenes.
Another example of the element of pacing is action within a scene. Instead of simply a shot of a door handle, the videographer can stage the shot with a hand reaching out to open the car door. Even if the door handle shot is actually longer than a static shot of the handle, the action helps keep the pacing up because the audience remains engaged by watching the action of the hand.
Adding the action helps the editor transition from an outside view to details on the inside. It also brings a human element into the video and allows the viewer to better imagine going for a ride. Scenes with action are, by their nature, faster paced than scenes of static imagery.
In order to achieve this, I decided to start with doing something very particular of fast paced scenes, which is zooming in an out at some specific moments, because as the research mentions, static shots are not very good when it comes down to making a fast paced scene. This was very important at the time of shooting because these were actions that I couldn't fix or do in the editing as the resolution of the file wouldn't be as good to allow me in creating the zooms and that in post. The zooms in my opinion added a bit of live to the scenes and made the audience get more into it and follow some characters and actions as well. Here is an example of a shot I did and how zoomed it at an specific moment:
I used this throughout the nightclub shots, without using it too much as it was going to become very dull. I think this worked quite well and definitely made the scene more fas paced, because even if the action is repeated or a bit slow, the zooming quick into the action adds pace and movement to it.
The second aspect of it that I researched on which is a bit based on the first one, is Getting the Right Pace:
So how do you determine what type of pacing is best for your project? Generally speaking, the younger the audience, the faster the pace they can comfortably tolerate. But that's a generalization and like all generalizations, it's as false as it is true.
The movie Titanic was a huge hit with adolescent girls. While it was an action move on it's surface, the scenes that attracted that particular audience were the love scenes between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and not the fast pace action sequences. The lesson is that if you give an audience content it wants to see, they'll stay happy when you linger a bit on scenes. If the core material is less intrinsically interesting, it's often wise to keep the video pace moving, so you don't risk putting your audience to sleep.
In my case, the creation of this was hard in terms of the pace, because although we had scenes like drinking, dancing and partying mood, we also had a bit of chatting face to face and on the phone, which were scenes that I couldn't show at the same pace otherwise they would look rushed or just not understood. The scenes are two:
The first one was Ollie talking to a random girl
And the second was Dean talking on the phone
Although there was no dialogue to edit in this, there was still the need to hold those shots for 1 or 2 seconds longer tomato sure the audience picked up on the action as they are important and add something to characters storylines later in the film.
The last thing I did alongside and with the help of the photographer, Paul Saunders, was to get some of shots of people dancing and get some flashes from his camera to hit them, giving the illusion of pictures being taken at the nightclub scene as part of any nightclub you go were pictures are constantly being taken. I think this effect worked out pretty well and although it is not used throughout the whole things because otherwise it doesn't become as unique, it adds a bit of nightclubbing mood which is what I wanted to make sure was achieved. This is a still of the outcome of one of them:
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